


Meet Apart

by kindkit



Category: Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Angst, Hospital, Injury, M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-02
Updated: 2011-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-14 08:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James spends the night with Richard--in hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meet Apart

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work of fiction. It's based on the public personas of real people, but the words and events are all made up.
> 
> I haven't yet had the opportunity to read Richard's book about his accident, and out of the descriptions and interviews I have read/seen, I've cherry-picked the details that best fit the story I wanted to tell. Thus I make no claim to accuracy even in the incidentals. The story title, by the way, is taken from Emily Dickinson's poem [I cannot live with You](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15802).

_Go home_ , James tells Mindy. _Get some sleep, spend some time with your girls. They need you too. I'll stay._ It's the first lie he's ever told that is, technically, quite true. He's not even ashamed of it until she thanks him.

After she leaves, he waits ten minutes in his chair in the corner before he shifts to the one at Richard's bedside, the one Mindy has occupied for the last two days. It's no longer warm from her body when he sits down in it. It's just a chair.

"Hullo, Hamster," he says. "It's me. James. James May."

Between the nurses' frequent visits, he reads to Richard: articles from an old _Telegraph_ , car makers' promotional bumf he finds in his jacket pocket, even, desperately, a chapter of a Maeve Binchy novel Mindy's mum left behind. But he draws the line at the hospital pamphlet about head injuries, the one that made Mindy cry. When he runs out of ready-made, impersonal words, he tells Richard about the hospital canteen's revolting so-called tea (like tepid compost) and the state of the weather as James last saw it through the window. "Consider this a threat," he says, at 2:46 in the morning. His eyes feel gritty, windburned, as though he's been driving a convertible through a quarry for hours. "Better wake up, Hamster, or I'll bore you to - to tears."

Perhaps he'll read out the more ridiculous concept-car specs again. It's good for coma patients to hear voices, the doctors have said. Well, no, to be precise they've said it's probably good. It can't do any harm.

There is no more harm to be done to Richard, lost at the bottom of the Glasgow Coma Scale. Even pain doesn't reach him. He doesn't move. Machines move, helping him breathe, monitoring him with fine-tuned mechanical sensors, beeping and whirring. They are tireless and unfaltering. James thinks of the other machine, the Vampire (oh, the universe's little jokes) that did this to Richard. He wonders if someone's repairing it. Replace the smashed parts, reconnect some wires, and it'll rise out of its coffin. At worst they'll build another one, identical or even improved.

Right now, James hates cars. They disgust him, so engineered, so perfectible. He never wants to drive again.

If he'd been driving the Vampire, he would be dead. And Richard would be all right.

"Richard," James says. "Wake up, Richard." He inches his chair closer to the bed and looks at the body lying there, stiller than he would have thought Richard could be, even unconscious. Richard's head is mummified in gauze and tape, but his hands lie bare on the sheets. His fingers curve slightly inwards, hinting at the frozen claws that will - _may_ \- come later, if Richard's muscles atrophy. James touches him, fingertip to a knuckle, and holds his breath, and breathes, somehow, and listens to twenty or thirty beeps, and spreads his hand over Richard's thin cold fingers.

This is not what he wished for. This is not what he imagined, not the one thing he let himself think of, knowing he couldn't fantasise about touching more of Richard than this--hand in hand, sitting in the quiet--and ever look him in the eye again, ever work with him or be his friend.

This is not what he wanted, and yet he's shaking. The shape of Richard's hand brings tears to his eyes.

He touches Richard's wedding ring, a thin band bought cheap long before _Top Gear_ and Porsche 911s. James used to imagine that finger bare, Mindy gone off to Italy or Australia, happy but very far away, an obstacle removed. Now that he's seen her face grey and tight with exhaustion, makeup all rubbed off, the edges of her fingernails chewed to swollen pinkness, he'll never be able to imagine it again.

She thanked him. She thanked him for staying. _You've been such a good friend_.

"Wake up, Hamster," James says. "We miss you. Your girls. Your wife. Even Clarkson. He's got no one to make short jokes about. He'll be trying them on me before long, and we can't have that." He lifts Richard's hand to his own chest and cradles it there. "I miss you. Christ, Richard. Wake up, get better, come and fix motorbikes with me. We'll be mates, really proper mates, and I won't . . . I'll stop . . . " He never wished disaster on Richard, never _hoped_ for divorce and whatever depth of loneliness it would take to bring Richard to him. Imagining is not wishing. "Get better. Don't go."

If James can train all his hopes, discipline them to run in harness towards this one horizon, rein them away from any other desire . . . then what? Will the God he doesn't believe in reward him by letting Richard live? Stupid. Richard makes him stupid. He makes himself a fool over Richard, one way or another.

"Wake up," he whispers. "Wake up." He squeezes Richard's hand, only realising that he's waiting for a cheaply poetic miracle when he gets no returned pressure from the slack muscles. His common sense should have warned him. Hasn't he always known that he can't hope for anything from Richard but this, all his wishes sparking up and burning out in the air?

James lays Richard's hand on the bed again, but keeps holding it. Friends can do that. Jeremy did, when he visited.

A nurse comes in a little later and tends to Richard--tends to Richard's machines, mostly--in efficient, sympathetic silence. On her way out, she pats James's shoulder. "You should go home and rest," she says. "We'll ring if there's any change." She must take him for a family member; it's not him the hospital will ring, but Mindy.

"In a little while," James lies. This is what he has of Richard, this long night that isn't at all what he wanted. This unresponding hand in his. It's nothing that even the bitterest fate could begrudge him, and so he'll keep it for himself.


End file.
